Publications

@mastersthesis{Durus2009,
title = {The Organizing of Activities in Learner Inhabited Interaction. Discourse Marking Practices},
author = {Natalia Durus},
year = {2009},
date = {2009-07-01},
school = {University of Luxembourg},
abstract = {Contrasting with traditional research in Second Language Acquisition, having at the centre learners as language learners, current research focuses on learners as language users, by analyzing their language development from the organizing of the activities in interaction. In this line, the present study presents the organizing of the activities through the analysis of discourse marking practices.

This empirical non-experimental study has as primary data one audio recording from a second language classroom setting. The recording was done in Luxembourg on the 11th of June 2008 in the context of a Romanian second language interaction and it concerns a group of seven plurilingual participants, six learners and one expert. The learners have been studying Romanian as part of the same group for the last three years. The expert has Romanian as first language and has been assisting the novices in their language development for the last three years.

Within this recording there are stretches of interaction managed by learners only further referred to as Learner inhabited interaction (Lii), a generic term, created for the purposes of this paper. The analysis develops around the stretches of Lii which are at least 40 seconds long. We have seven such stretches and they account for approximately 13 minutes out of 41.06 minutes of interaction. The Lii stretches begin and end with the expert’s turn.

The stretches of Lii in a Romanian second language classroom particularly show the organizing of the activities. Three dimensions have been identified: a preference for agreement, a preference for disagreement and a preference for reorienting. They were made relevant by the analysis of discourse marking practices, in particular practices which make use of dar (but), nu (no), da (yes), si (and), eh, äh, hm and cred (I think) , rhetoric questions and epistemic stances.
Examples of the discourse marking practices have been analyzed according to Conversation Analysis (CA) work from an interactional as well as an acquisitional point of view. The principles and methodological tools of CA (turn taking organization, sequence organization, repair organization and the organization of turn design) are employed in the analysis of the interaction.

The analysis has resulted in three conclusions for learning: learning as orienting to maintaining progressivity in Lii, learning as non-orienting to language expertise in Lii and learning as orienting through practices in Lii. The three conclusions for learning come close to the ones mentioned in section 3.2, Learner and Language learning, where we have discussed “learning as participation change” (Melander & Sahlström, 2008, 17) and the learner having “affordances for learning simply through the need to co-construct turns of talk in sequence to accomplish social actions.” (Hellermann, 2009, 120)

The analysis of the activities in interaction supports the recent findings on how learners not only do the learning work, but enact as users of the language.
},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {mastersthesis}
}